Long considered a major filmmaker, Federico Fellini established his reputation through an insistence on the interest-value of his own fantastic and idiosyncratic vision of the world… In so doing, however, he repeatedly lays himself open to charges of egomania, self-indulgence and superficiality; certainly much of his work, if visually extraordinary, is hyperbolic, naïve and incoherent…

This film about the hedonistic, amoral life of Rome's "beautiful people" is really a series of startling episodes held together by a character played by Marcello Mastroianni, a gossip columnist who is himself caught up in the aimless, scandalous "sweet life."

Filled, like all Fellini films, with stunning, bizarre images and faces and marked by the director's wild comic imagination, the film was widely condemned as "vulgar, witless, and intellectually bankrupt" and lavishly praised as "a cultural and social document, as well as an exciting entertainment."

"La Dolce Vita" moves from one shocking sequence to another… It is a sprawling epic satire on what Fellini considered the spiritual malaise of modern society… It followed a journalist employed by a scandal magazine around a Rome obsessed with orgiastic parties, voluptuous film stars and the commercial marketing of religion… While its images are flamboyant—a statue of Christ flying above Rome suspended from a helicopter, Anita Ekberg dancing in the Trevi fountain, a kitten on her head—the film's despairing tone often rings meaningless, even though Mastroanni's compulsive womanizer, never glamorized, fails to achieve redemption

Well, this episodic, ambitious exploration of life in Rome in 1960 hits one bull's eye after another and emerges as one of the best films of the 1960s, maybe one of the greatest ever. Imagine a film about boredom that is not in itself boring.

I fear, though, that some youths may be turned off by it because so many things stand for something else that I'm tempted to bundle them up into "themes." I can see it now. A couple of kids in phat pants wearing nostril rings, their ankles garnished with tattoos of barbed wire, hitting the beer or the hi-energy drinks on the couch, munching Doritos, scowling and cursing at the film from the very start. "Hey -- this thing's in BLACK AND WHITE. They're talking Portugese. And it's got SUBTITLES!" Maybe that's unkind though. Maybe they can shake off the MTV chains and manage to sit through this and discover something they didn't know about someone's life other than their own.

Marcello Maistroianni is the central figure, a journalist with an unfocused vision, who wanders from one episode to the next, wondering what to do with his life. He meets a LOT of interesting characters along the way, each representing something else. His desperate girl friend, Emma, offers him the life of a petty bourgeois. She'll feed him, give him a home and children, and she'll grow plump with age and develop the shadow of a mustache. Marcello isn't sure what he wants but he knows he doesn't want THAT.

His "intellectual" friend, Steiner, represents someone or something that Marcello would love to become. Steiner is sensitive, artistic, talented, a writer, poet, and a musician who plays Bach in a cathedral that is acoustically active because there are no people in it. Nobody is in it -- get it, kids? Anita Ekberg is the hypermastic Sylvia, an American movie star, her head as empty as her bodice is full. She doesn't understand a word of Italian as Marcello woos her, and he can't speak English. As they're about to kiss, knee deep in water, the Fontana Trevi shuts off, night dissolves into dawn, and a pizza delivery kid has stopped his bicycle to stare at them as they swish self-consciously out of the fountain.

Religion? The cathedral may be forgotten but religion in its rawest form is not. A young brother and sister team claim to have seen the Virgin Mary in a desolate vacant lot. The paparazzi have set up bright lights, generators, and cameras all over the place. Hundreds of the lame and halt appear at the site of the miracle, hoping for a cure. The paparazzi pay the kids' mother, father, and grandfather to pose on the balcony of a soulless apartment house, pointing supposedly at the spot where the vision occurred. The fact that the photographers have them pointing in different directions makes no difference. The paparazzi suddenly run off and leave the three alone on the balcony, and Fellini lingers for a few seconds on the absurd and tragic image of three posturing human statues there, mother pointing one way, father another, grandfather praying on his knees -- all of them fakes. It rains, the hot Klieg lights begin to explode, and a riot follows in which the supplicants tear apart the tree at which the Virgin appeared, stuffing leaves into their jackets, wrestling one another for souveniers or charms.

The final scene in which Marcello watches a monstrously ugly fish hauled out of the sea and then tries to communicate with a twelve-year-old blond angel, and fails, is heartbreaking.

The film isn't about boredom. It's not even about emptiness. It's about what's missing, the thing that creates the emptiness and leads to boredom. Fellini isn't up front about it, and neither was Orson Welles when he dealt with a similar issue in "Citizen Kane." Fellini was more explicit in some of his other films -- "I Vitelloni" and "Amarcord" ("I Remember"). Traditional values, and the youthful innocence that made them possible, are being lost. Values have been cheapened. Not that those values were perfect or indeed anything but illusory, but how can we get along without our myths? We follow kids around who see the Virgin Mary and who like some politicians because they resemble "rock stars." We're losing our ability to appreciate Bach and the patience to sit through a black-and-white movie made in another country. Our assessments of other peoples has been degraded into "good" and "evil" without modulation. Our Western culture seems to have passed from naive to decadent without ever having gone through florescence. If this is what Fellini was getting at, it's no wonder the film is as sad as it is.

This movie is about a Roman journalist at the crossroads of his life but unable to move forward in any meaningful direction. He is a man trapped in his life of superficiality.

Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita is a very aesthetically beautiful film. The widescreen compositions are often outstanding. The crisp black and white photography is lit to perfection and a joy to behold. One of the factors that makes Italian cinema in general so appealing for me is the gorgeous natural light of that country, allied with the stylish decor and architecture; and in this film these elements are well in abundance. If nothing else, La Dolce Vita is a treat to the eyes. Style over substance is a term that could certainly also be applied to the denizens of LDV's Rome. We are introduced to an array of beautiful but shallow character's; from Marcello Mastroianni's gossip journalist, via Anita Ekberg's international film star or Nico's fashion model, everyone is beautiful on the surface but somewhat dead underneath. And perhaps this is a problem with the film in general; a three hour expose of shallow people is an exhausting experience.

The film is not plot-driven. It's episodic, divided into seven days in the life of a Roman gossip columnist. It's not always obvious what the point of certain events actually is. I found myself spending quite a lot of energy actually trying to actively understand the meaning of Marcello's experiences, and not always successfully I concede. But suffice to say that a very general reading of the film's message would be that it is about the superficiality of celebrity and the emptiness of much of modern urban life. And while a lot of it is still very relevant today – in particular the public's obsession with celebrity – it's not always clear what Fellini is trying to say. It's quite an obtuse film, with a fair amount of symbolic imagery and loaded dialogue. It's certainly serious cinema. Although I often found myself enjoying it most when it was less intellectual and more sensual, such as the wonderful iconic scene where Anita Ekberg takes a dip in the Fontana di Trevi. This justifiably famous sequence is the most purely cinematic moment in La Dolce Vita and, in my opinion, the film could have benefited from more scenes of such striking power punctuated through its three hour running time.

Overall, although I do admire this film, I find it too tiring and drawn out to love. It's very well acted and photographed, it's just a little unengaging and occasionally tedious. That said, it's one to seek out if you are at all interested in 60's New Wave cinema.